Imagining the Scene and the Memory of the F-Club: Talking About Lost Punk and Post-Punk Spaces in Leeds
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Citation: Spracklen, K and Henderson, S and Procter, D (2016) Imagining the Scene and the Memory of the F-Club: Talking About Lost Punk and Post-Punk Spaces in Leeds. Punk and Post Punk. ISSN 2044-1983 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/punk.5.2.147_1 Link to Leeds Beckett Repository record: https://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/id/eprint/2929/ Document Version: Article (Accepted Version) The aim of the Leeds Beckett Repository is to provide open access to our research, as required by funder policies and permitted by publishers and copyright law. The Leeds Beckett repository holds a wide range of publications, each of which has been checked for copyright and the relevant embargo period has been applied by the Research Services team. We operate on a standard take-down policy. If you are the author or publisher of an output and you would like it removed from the repository, please contact us and we will investigate on a case-by-case basis. Each thesis in the repository has been cleared where necessary by the author for third party copyright. If you would like a thesis to be removed from the repository or believe there is an issue with copyright, please contact us on [email protected] and we will investigate on a case-by-case basis. Imagining the scene and the memory of the F-Club: Talking about lost punk and post- punk spaces in Leeds Karl Spracklen, Stephen Henderson and David Procter (all Leeds Beckett University, UK) Contact: [email protected] Abstract The F-Club in Leeds, UK, was a punk and post-punk night and club from the 1970s into the 1980s. Leeds as a city has a reputation for alternative music scenes, and the F-Club is part of the history recalled by musicians and fans locally. In this paper, we interview people who publicly identified with going to the F-Club back in their youth, to map connections as well as memories, identity-work and myth-making. We are interested in leisure spaces and leisure lives, as well as cultural spaces and identity-work. We explore the history of the F-Club, its place in wider networks and the memories of it by those who attended it. We explore the ways in which the F-Club is remembered and talked about by self-declared members of the scenes around the club. Our interest is not so much in mapping and understanding the identity-work and the community of the F-Club as it actually happened, but how our respondents construct these things now from their own memories. This paper also contributes to methodological and theoretical debates about network analysis against ethnography in the sociology of music, and defends the latter as a way to construct an emerging public sociology of leisure. Key words: music; Leeds; identity; community; public sociology, leisure, punk Introduction Popular music scenes have been the subject of much analysis since Cohen (2011) and Hebdige (1979). Recent years have led to a plethora of ethnographic accounts of subcultures, such as the descriptions of the identity-work in the lives goths in the work of Hodkinson (2002, 2011), the many contributions to this journal, or the work of Kahn-Harris (2007) on belonging in extreme-metal. Such insider accounts have been criticized for their over-reliance on insider knowledge and their necessary subjectivity (Bottero and Crossley 2011; Jarman, Theodoraki, Hall and Ali-Knight 2014). That is, such qualitative, ethnographic work, while interesting, often fails to produce any generalizable conclusions that contribute to our theoretical understanding of popular culture and society. Or worse, such accounts are taken as the truth of a particular music sub-culture, and the problem of representation is elided (Bottero and Crossley 2011). More recently, popular-music studies have seen the introduction of various forms of social network analysis (SNA) used to map the connections between people, places and bands, typified by the work of Crossley (2015a, 2015b). SNA eschews reliance on ethnographic data collection for a more objective analysis of connections. But a criticism of this network analysis might be that the conclusions it constructs are empty of wider theoretical explanation about the importance, meaning and purpose of the subject matter. In popular music studies, that means SNA may well fail to produce any contribution to social and cultural theory on the intersections of power, the limits of agency and the ways in which belonging and exclusion are made. From our perspective in the sociology of leisure, we believe that the engaged and critical public sociology called for by Burawoy (2005, 2014) is constrained if one favours only a calculus of relations over a co-production of meanings. We will show in this paper that music and leisure can be explored and understood as sites for meaning-making, and as sites for public sociological engagement and counter-hegemonic resistance – but only through reading between the lines of connections. In this paper our focus is members of a particular music scene: the F-Club1 in Leeds, UK, a punk and post-punk night and club, which ran from the 1970s into the 1980s (see O’Brien 2011 in this journal for her account of Leeds at the time). Leeds as a city has a reputation for alternative music scenes, and the F-Club is part of the history recalled by musicians and fans locally. The F-Club had had, and continues to have, national and international recognition in post-punk histories, as it was the space from which influential bands such as Gang of Four, The Mekons and later The Sisters of Mercy emerged. Fans still talk to each other about the F-Club on social media, and in pubs and venues in Leeds and beyond. We set out to interview people who publicly identified with going to the F-Club back in their youth, so that we could map connections as well as memories, identity-work and myth-making. We are interested in leisure spaces and leisure lives, as well as cultural spaces and identity-work. The research project explores the history of the F-Club, its place in wider networks and the memories of it by those who attended it. We explore the ways in which the F-Club is remembered and talked about by self-declared members of the scenes around the club. Our interest is not so much in mapping and understanding the identity-work and the community of the F-Club as it actually happened, but how our respondents construct these things now from their own memories. Our aim is to make sense of how people think about this, their memories and their connections. We use discourse tracing of semi-structured-interviews to ensure we make an explanatory contribution to theoretical understanding of popular music and leisure in society. In this paper we will suggest that societal marginality is central to the story-telling of our respondents, but that within the F-Club and the scene there were key foci of power and status, and in remembering the F-Club the majority of our respondents still see the value of punk as a space for resistance against the mainstream. That is, in their construction of the past, 1 The F-Club was not a discrete venue, but a punk night and gigs promoted by John Keenan under the banner of the F-Club in a number of venues of differing sizes in Leeds over the time of its existence. For more details see Keenan’s own attempt at mapping the history: http://www.liveinleeds.com/30jfk.htm. their memories and re-telling of what they believe to be true about the past, they have laid claim to what they consider to be an authentic sub-cultural capital.2 The community and belonging constructed around the F-Club shows the importance of cultural capital and agency. That is, idealization of the past in the myth-making shows how important communicative leisure practices (Spracklen 2009) are for our respondents in a changed scene, city and world. Before we present the analyses, and our discussion and conclusion, we need to map put our theoretical framework, and justify and explain our methods. Before we do either of those things, however we need to give some more historical and sociological detail and context about Leeds, its music scenes, and the F-Club. Leeds Leeds is a post-industrial city in the north of England, the centre of a wider metropolitan area in what used to be in administrative terms the West Riding of Yorkshire. It is the biggest city in Yorkshire, and its metropolitan district is one of the largest in England. Bradford is directly to the west of Leeds, and Wakefield is the old county capital to the south-east. In the 1970s it still had a large engineering industry, but this was already in decline. By the 1980s the city faced a number of challenging socio-economic problems caused by the neo-liberal transformations of the national economy: increased unemployment, crime and anti-social behaviour, urban decline and dereliction (Chatterton 2010). But the city council and government agencies worked to sell Leeds as a financial and government capital of the North, or at least the north-east of England. Gentrification started in the 1990s, but reached a peak in the 2000s (Chatterton 2010). The global recession hit Leeds and the north harder than the south of England, and in the 2010s the city is still to recover and is divided, with large numbers of 2 We follow Thornton (1996): sub-cultural capital earned as something associated with looking cool and real in a particular sub-cultural space.